The week in .NET – 1/12/2016

On.NET

Last week, we had Mads Torgersen on the show to talk about language design in general, and C# in particular. This week, we’ll talk to Jonathan Chambers from the Unity 3D team about game engines, and using .NET to target iOS, Android, or even the Web. Please send me your questions ahead of time, or attend the show and ask them on the chat. Tune in on Thursday, at 10:00AM PST to view the show live!

Package of the week #1: JSON.NET 8

JSON.NET needs no introduction, as it is the recommended library to serialize and deserialize JSON in .NET. James Newton-King just released version 8.0 with lots of bug fixes, and great performance improvements. To improve perf on an already very fast library, James introduced new ways in which a JSON.NET user can avoid memory allocations. Instead of allocating new buffers as needed, the new code uses pools of buffers:

The new feature is still somewhat experimental, and for now, you’ll need to provide your own implementation of IArrayPool (a sample is provided on the announcement post). In future versions, there will be a built-in implementation.

Package of the week #2: Colorful.Console

Console applications are cool, but they can be even cooler with some added color. Colorful.Console is a drop-in replacement for System.Console that adds some new APIs that make it super-simple to write in color. But that’s not all: it also contains a super-cool API that can transform text into ASCII art:

F#

Great progress has been made to add .NET Core support to the Visual F# compiler. The compiler and F# Interactive now run on CoreCLR on Windows, OS X, and Linux, but there’s still plenty of work left. To track the progress of the project and find ways to contribute, check out the status page on Github.

Contribute to the week in .NET

As always, this weekly post couldn’t exist without community contributions, and I’d like to thank all those who sent links and tips. You can participate too. Did you write a great blog post, or just read one? Do you want everyone to know about an amazing new contribution or a useful library? We’d love to hear from you, and feature your contributions on future posts: